Domain Masters Radio Show

Domain Parking & PPC Advertising

Monte: Now, moving on to some other topics, what’s going on in the parking page and PPC business, from your perspective, both on a positive and negative side? This is something you basically have expertise in.

Richard: Yeah, I guess let’s start with the bad news. You know, these are just issues that people should bear in mind and put some thought to and form their own opinions on, but some of the things that I see coming down the pipe that I’ve discussed with other domainers is the increasing supply of park pages, and whether that’s from just more domainers are being aware of parking their pages with PPC partners or whether it’s ISPs doing 404 pages, you know, there’s an increasing supply which then puts, you know, as supply increases, the pressure on the bids, you know, the bids can come down.

Monte: Right, so it’s having--in some ways, it can have a negative effect on the overall PPC marketplace, in terms of kind of flooding the market with PPC pages--

Richard: Right.

Monte: --based off of not enough advertisers. However, on the positive side, I assume from all of the information that I’m reading is that that market is picking quite a bit, more and more people are advertising online.

Richard: Right.

Monte: And that’s the positive side, so hopefully the suppliers are meeting the needs of the parking page providers and the publishers.

Richard: Yeah. I mean, I do have, you know, I’ve got a list of negative issues, and I’ve got a list of positive issues, and by far, the positives outweigh the negatives, otherwise I wouldn’t be in this business.

Monte: Right.

Richard: You know, the--I don’t know if everyone’s been watching what new.net’s been doing, but they’ve created a site finding killer, and, you know, they provide DNS to all of the, you know, to all of the customers of Earthlink and Sprint and other ISPs, so that they can power their, you know, dot-shop and dot-whatever--

Monte: Right.

Richard: --that are not ICANN-authorized extensions. And they do that by providing route DNS service to these large ISPs so that when an Earthlink customer types in, you know, blahblahblah.shop, that it--

Monte: They can recognize that extension.

Richard: --[inaudible] route servers. So from that, you know, they can call what domain names people are entering that are, you know, legitimate dot-com or dot-net or dot-org domains that do not exist, and they can so, “Oh look, we [inaudible] typing all six errors on this domain name that doesn’t exist, let’s go out and register it.” And so new.net, you know, it’s a brilliant move--

Monte: Yeah.

Richard: --but it is increasing drastically the supply of park pages. But, you know, it’s something that Site Finder [inaudible] was willing to do, I guess, some would argue that new.net has to pay $6 per domain name, where [inaudible] was just putting in a single star record and grabbing all of the money.

Monte: Right, without even having ownership.

Richard: Right.

Monte: That was the big issue with Site Finder, is what right do they have as the registry to even monetize [ph] that channel--

Richard: Exactly.

Monte: --when they are claiming ownership of domain names they never even owned.

Richard: I mean, you know, new.net, some people talk negatively about it, and probably including myself, but it’s really more jealousy than--

Monte: Yeah.

Richard: --anything else.

Monte: Yeah. And there’s--and they’re not the only ones, there’s a lot of people doing it, of course, you know, not to the extent, but, you know, anytime you type in something in a browser, I know you’re on a Microsoft product, you’re gonna go to their search.

Richard: Right.

Monte: And, you know, other people are doing it. It was just a big issue, obviously, with SightFinder, because of the registry issue, and it is one thing if you own the name, it is the fact that they’re collecting intelligence based off the name before they register it. So they know how many times it’s typed in and then they go out and register it and then it becomes their name.

Richard: Exactly.

Monte: Yeah.

Richard: So there’s a real battle for the typos, and whether it’s going to be won by the browser, whether it’s going to be won by new.net type services, or whether it’s gonna be won by the individual domainer, who is just, you know, working hard in the mine.

Monte: Right.

Richard: It remains to be seen, but that battle is raging.

Monte: Right.